Basic tasks in Outlook 2013

Microsoft Outlook 2013 organizes your emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, and to-do lists, all in one place. It all starts with your email account. From there you can start working with emails, turning them into tasks or appointments, and storing the people you interact with in your contacts, so you never have to remember an email address or phone number. Let’s take a quick walk-through of those basic steps.

Set up an email account

The first step is setting up your account. After that, you’ll be ready to start receiving and sending email, use the calendar, create contacts, and work with tasks.

Setup gets taken care of automatically if you used an earlier version of Outlook on the same computer. If you didn’t, the Auto Account Setup will start the first time you start Outlook and step you through the process.

It’ll ask for your name, email address, and a password. That’s usually enough, but if automatic setup fails, Outlook will ask for a few more pieces of information, such as your mail server name.

If you don’t have that info, your email provider can give you the details.

Open or save an email message attachment

You can open an attachment from the Reading Pane or from an open message. After opening and viewing an attachment, you can save it. If a message has more than one attachment, you can save them as a group or one at a time.

Add a signature

Create a calendar appointment

In Outlook, appointments aren’t the same as meetings. Appointments are activities that you schedule in your calendar that don’t involve inviting other people or reserving resources, such a conference room.

In Calendar, click New Appointment. You can also right-click a time block in your calendar grid, and then click New Appointment.

Set a reminder

Reminders pop-up an alert window so you don’t miss an important deadline. You can add or remove reminders for almost anything in Outlook, including email messages, appointments, and contacts.

For appointments or meetings

Open an Appointment or Meeting, and then in the Reminder drop-down list, select the amount of time before the appointment or meeting when you want the reminder to appear. To turn a reminder off, select None.

For email messages, contacts, and tasks

Click Follow Up > Add Reminder.

Tip You can quickly flag email messages as to-do items by using reminders. This makes the message appear on the Task peek and in Tasks, but doesn’t automatically add a reminder. Right-click the flag in the message list to add a reminder. Or, if you have the message open, click Follow Up > Add Reminder.

Create a task

Many people keep To Do lists — on paper, in a spreadsheet, or with a combination of paper and electronic methods. In Outlook, you can combine various lists into one, get reminders, and track task progress.